AMD is gearing up for the release of five new A-Series Trinity APUs, which sources say could start shipping to manufacturers this October. Perfect timing, of course, as that will allow Windows OEMs to drop the chips into new systems running Windows 8 just in time for the holiday shopping rush.

The new A-Series chips are expected to line up squarely against Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors. On the budget end of the spectrum, there’s the dual-core A6-5400. It’s clocked at 3.6GHz (3.8GHz turbo mode) and features HD 7540D graphics. Next up are the quad-core A8-5500 and A8-5600, which run at 3.2/3.7GHz and 3.6/3.9GHz and utilize an HD 7560D GPU. Rounding out the additions are the A10-5700 and A10-5800, which run at 3.4/4.0GHz and 3.8/4.2GHz respectively and pack HD 7660D graphics.

Both the A8-5600 and A10-5800 will have a TDP of 100 watts, while the rest of the new AMD APUs come in at 65 watts. That should mean that the new systems will not only run faster than last-gen Trinity-based system, but also cooler and quieter as well.

The new APUs will drop into AMD’s socket FM2 and will run on either the A75 or A85X Fusion Controller Hub. There are few differences between the two, but if you’re looking for RAID 5 support and plan on hooking up more than six SATA drives you’ll need to make sure you pick up a board that uses the A85X. The X is important, too, as some manufacturers will apparently be launching boards with the A75 and naming them A85-XXX and others will be naming A85X boards the same way.

Reader Comments

I think I’ll wait for the review. Can’t risk burning money on a new gaming rig just to find out an i3-2100 can outperform these chips, again.

Barron

I thought the same thing, till I got an A6 3400m llano and found out it was faster than my i5 for real world use.

The i5 seems to do well in the synthetic benchmarks, but when it comes to multitasking, I can tell that the A6 feels much more responsive.

http://www.facebook.com/FreshPrinceOfLC Tyler Roemhildt

The i3 would only have an actual edge over it in really CPU-intensive tasks. The APUs even have OpenCL now, so even some CPU tasks may not hold as much weight. I have an A8 and it performs identically to an i7-2600k in everything except for high-end games and things like media conversions.

Ayup! I notice no difference at all between the Intel chips and the AMD ones when it comes to everyday stuff, the AMD chips IGP fare better than the Intel when it comes to playing video and some games. BUT the AMD chips don’t fare well when running the heavy stuff unless it’s software optimized for handling the Radeon GPU.

Still though, the AMD chips are a great choice for the average Joe/Jane in terms of cost/efficiency.

I’ll stick to Intel chips but that’s my preference.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1223563048 Angel Ham

Ayup! I notice no difference at all between the Intel chips and the AMD ones when it comes to everyday stuff, the AMD chips IGP fare better than the Intel when it comes to playing video and some games. BUT the AMD chips don’t fare well when running the heavy stuff unless it’s software optimized for handling the Radeon GPU.

Still though, the AMD chips are a great choice for the average Joe/Jane in terms of cost/efficiency.